Experts of the book, Hitler’s Spies: Secret Agents and the Intelligence War in South Africa, published by Jonathan Ball Publishers.
by Evert Kleynhans
The vast majority of academic and popular histories on the South African participation in the Second World War have traditionally focused on the military operations of the Union Defence Force (UDF) during the campaigns in East Africa, North Africa, Madagascar and Italy. Single battles during the war, such as the defeats at Sidi Rezegh and Tobruk, or the gallant defence at the first battle of El Alamein, have received the bulk of attention.
More recently, there has been a drive by historians to study the South African participation in the war from a more general war-and-society approach. A new crop of local historians have begun to challenge the status quo, consciously moving away from the traditional ‘drum and trumpet’ approach. Historians such as Ian van der Waag, Karen Horn1 and David Katz, to name a few, have started to reconsider the South African participation in the war from different perspectives. These ‘new’ military histories have helped to rekindle popular interest in the war. Unfortunately, despite this renewed interest, the quantity and quality of Second World War histories produced in South Africa lags drastically behind current international trends. This holds true for both popular and academic works.
My own interest in the South African home front during the war was sparked while working as a historian at the Department of Defence Archives in Pretoria. As a young lieutenant in the enquiries section, I often had free rein to investigate the dusty corners of the military archives. As the late Jeff Grey put it so aptly, I stood humbly in the antechambers of Clio. Fresh out of the honours programme in military history offered by the Faculty of Military Science of Stellenbosch University, and with a healthy appetite to acquire new knowledge, I used every available opportunity to draw files on whatever stirred my curiosity.
One day in 2012, a file titled ‘U-boat matters – Operation Order “Eisbär”’ caught my eye. The document in question detailed the first sustained German U-boat operation launched along the South African coast towards the end of 1942. Adjacent to this file, there were three archival boxes full of material documenting a unique and overlooked aspect of the naval war in South African waters. After a further trawl of the archives, I discovered a wealth of substantiating material, ranging from personal accounts to war diaries, logbooks and operational orders – some even in the original German.
I realised then and there that I wanted to learn more about this understudied episode of South African military history. There was indeed a story to be told. This chance discovery set in motion a series of events that spanned nearly seven years, the culmination of which was the successful completion of my doctoral dissertation at Stellenbosch University in 2018.
From the outset it was apparent that both professional and amateur historians had paid scant attention to the South African home front during the war. Moreover, the naval war in South African waters, and especially the interrelated aspects of maritime insecurity, naval strategy, antisubmarine warfare and the broader intelligence war in the region, had been largely cast aside. In this regard, the works of Neil Orpen and Kalfie Martin, Jennifer Crwys-Williams and Bill Nasson immediately come to mind.
As I embarked on my research, I took heed of the forewarning by the renowned British historian Jeremy Black, who cautions that the uniqueness of naval history requires it to be studied in the context of the conflict on land and in the air. Despite Black’s warning, histories focusing on the naval war off the southern African coast have generally fallen into the trap of reducing naval history to a mere tactical and operational study of the conflict at sea.
This isolationist approach is particularly evident in South Africa, with the vast majority of the available histories addressing the naval war on an operational level only. What is needed is a detailed appreciation of the home front during the war, especially the key role the pro-Afrikaner cultural movement the Ossewabrandwag played in support of the German war effort and in opposition to South African involvement in the war.
It also requires an investigation into the intelligence war waged in the country, since the German government actively reached out to the Ossewabrandwag and established a spy network in collaboration with them. I wanted to establish whether there was a link: did naval intelligence gathered in southern Africa and transmitted to Germany in any way influence the naval war? Also, what level of threat did the spy network present to national security?
My appointment as institutional archivist at North-West University in Potchefstroom, in July 2015, opened up several new research avenues concerning the broader naval war. As part of my new posting, I also became the de facto archivist of the Ossewabrandwag Archive. This underappreciated, and largely unknown, archival collection contains key source material detailing the nature and operation of the German intelligence networks in southern Africa during the war. The archive documents the links between Johannes Frederick Janse van Rensburg, commonly known as Hans van Rensburg, Ossewabrandwag leader, his inner circle and Germany throughout the war.
I had stumbled upon a proverbial treasure trove of information, which had been largely withheld from historians after the National Party’s electoral victory in 1948. More importantly, the documents in the Ossewabrandwag Archive offered a counterpoint to the vast trove of MI5 case files preserved at the National Archives of the United Kingdom in Kew, London. Despite their decidedly one-sided approach, British historians had used these very files to write up the first accounts detailing the intelligence war in southern Africa. I was in the fortunate position where I could combine both sets of primary documents, as well as the available secondary sources, in an attempt to get closer to the illusory historical ‘truth’.
Jeremy Black champions the re-examination of historical events, particularly when the military historian can reconcile a variety of primary and secondary sources on a specific subject. He argues that such a reassessment allows the military historian the unique opportunity to reinterpret previous historical accounts, probe largely untapped primary archival sources, and provide a fresh analysis of key moments in military history. Such an opportunity presented itself with this book.
Black, citing Rory Muir’s Salamanca 1812, highlights the unique undertaking thus created. Muir states:
[W]hile the sources are plentiful, they do not always fit neatly together; indeed, they are riddled with contradictions, inconsistencies, gaps and uncertainty … Normally the historian deals privately with these problems … This method is inescapable in addressing a large, sweeping subject if the narrative is not to lose its momentum and the reader to miss the thread of the argument. However, it can also mislead the reader by suggesting that our understanding is far more securely based than is the case.
Methodology, historiography and archival sources
The American historians Stephen Morillo and Michael Pavkovic argue for a broad definition of military history. To them the essence of military history encompasses:
not just the history of war and wars, but any historical study in which military personnel of all sorts, warfare, military institutions, and their various intersections with politics, economics, society, nature and culture form the focus or topic of the work. One obvious implication of such a broad definition is that many works of military history could also be classified variously as political, economic, institutional, intellectual, social or cultural history. Indeed the best history, military and otherwise, necessarily crosses many of these abstract academic boundaries in order to present as rich and rounded a view of the past as possible.
The renowned British historian Sir Michael Howard, in support of this broad definition, cautions that the study of military history requires both depth and breadth, as well as context: depth, to move beyond the imposed historical patterns of apparent orderliness in a concerted effort to try and understand what war was really like; breadth, to understand the sequence of historical events as well as the existence of continuity and discontinuity in the past; and context, to appreciate the myriad of social, political and economic factors that influence the military in general.
Generally speaking, the study of military history is not well respected within the broader academic community of historians. This is especially true in South Africa. The root of this disregard lies in the very subject matter of military history – war. But despite this general academic disdain, military history remains ever-popular with the reading public.
In South Africa three approaches to military history can be discerned: popular, professional and academic. The popular approach to military history by far dominates the available historiography on the bookshelves. The so-called Border War retains popular appeal, especially among the generation of white men who had to do compulsory national service. The historiography of the South African participation in both world wars and Korea is alarmingly scant, with one or two notable exceptions. In fact, this field was for a long time dominated by lay historians, and in particular former journalists, with a definite propagandistic agenda.
There have been, however, several exciting developments in terms of the professional and academic study of South African military history. Over the past ten years there has been a definite drive by a crop of younger historians to re-evaluate South Africa’s participation in these wars. Their work stands in stark contrast to the traditional ‘drum and trumpet’ approach. Yet these studies are for the most part unknown, often underestimated, and very rarely published.
Intelligence history is a definite subfield of military history. Since the mid-1980s, historians have gradually reclaimed the study of intelligence history. The broader field of intelligence studies has since gained immense international interest, especially among the academic community. This is evidenced by the appearance of numerous books and journal articles authored by both former practitioners and policy-makers, as well as academics and journalists.
Previously, intelligence history was dominated by journalistic accounts and unreliable memoirs. Prominent historians such as Christopher Andrew even went as far as to label these works the ‘airport bookstall’ school of intelligence history. The ‘unhistoricism’, coupled with the recording of national ‘security services’ histories, continues to dissuade professional historians from moving into the field of intelligence history. In South Africa, the discipline is yet to move past the ‘airport bookstall’ approach.
Intelligence historian Jules Gaspard argues that the backbone to writing intelligence history remains methodological historical research. According to Gaspard, intelligence historians normally have recourse to three specific techniques in conducting historical research. First, they combine both private papers and their ‘adjacent’ records to construct a general framework of the missing intelligence dimension and flesh out the operational details. This approach is also referred to as ‘archival intelligence hacking’. Second, they consult official documents instead of only relying on a number of elite interviews. Third, intelligence historians are often required to depend on inside information from well-connected sources.
To make sense of the bigger intelligence history of southern Africa during the war, I was forced to adopt Gaspard’s analytical framework to a large extent while researching this book. As a starting point, I earmarked several key published texts in order to identify the evident historical gaps in the available literature.
The five volumes on the history of the British intelligence service during the Second World War, produced by Harry Hinsley and his colleagues, deserve special mention. Volume 4 of the series in particular provides valuable information on Anglo-South African cooperation with regard to intelligence gathering and distribution. It also includes an analysis of the German intelligence presence and its inner workings in southern Africa. The series is far more informative than some of the recent publications on the wartime British intelligence services. Unfortunately, the authors regard the events in southern Africa as a sideshow and therefore devote a few meagre paragraphs to them.
Several additional sources supplement Hinsley’s series. These publications allow for a deeper understanding of the complex nature of both the Allied counterintelligence and Axis intelligence organisations active in southern Africa during the war. Special attention has been paid to the strained relationships and interservice rivalry between the various Allied counterintelligence organisations. In addition, several of the authors have discussed wartime counterintelligence operations, particularly those in Mozambique. Unfortunately, they have relied almost exclusively on declassified MI5 documentation housed at the National Archives of the United Kingdom. As a result, these publications are decidedly one-sided in their historical analysis. Nevertheless, reference to the works of Kent Fedorowich, Edward Harrison, Patrick Furlong and Keith Shear is vital in any study of the Axis and Allied intelligence networks in southern Africa during the war.
Closer to home, the work of George Visser has been indispensable. Visser, a veteran policeman, was personally involved in several of the investigations and operations aimed at apprehending the known Axis agents in the Union. Unfortunately, Visser was never privy to the complete extent of the Axis intelligence network in southern Africa, especially when considering that a wealth of intelligence and related files have been declassified in South Africa and Britain since the appearance of his book, OB: Traitors or Patriots?, in 1976. The work of Ernst Malherbe, Andries Fokkens, Ian van der Waag and Fankie Monama supplement Visser’s work, though they are not intelligence histories per se. They do, however, contribute to the discussion on the Axis intelligence networks and their organisation in South Africa during the war, and especially the Allied measures taken to suppress them.
Several additional sources, mostly published in Afrikaans, also proved instrumental in getting to grips with this all-encompassing topic. They include the work of Lindie Koorts, Christoph Marx, Hans Strydom, Bob Moore, Will and Marietjie Radley, Hans Rooseboom and Albert Blake. The publications by Hans van Rensburg and Piet van der Schyff, though dated, deserve special mention.
Van Rensburg’s autobiography, though very informative, unsurprisingly fails to address the true nature and extent of his contact with Germany during the war. At times there is an offhand mention of related events, but it is evident that Van Rensburg did not wish to share his wartime secrets with his South African compatriots.
Van der Schyff’s work stands in contrast to all available work on the Ossewabrandwag. In his capacity as the erstwhile historian and archivist of the Ossewabrandwag, Van der Schyff was privy to a series of classified archival sources detailing the inner workings of the organisation, especially the wartime contact between the Ossewabrandwag and Germany. As a result, his work offers an unrivalled account of several lesser-known aspects of the intelligence war in southern Africa. Furthermore, Van der Schyff examines the post-war drive to charge Van Rensburg and his compatriots with high treason. However, he largely casts aside the MI5 archival material, and thus offers a mainly one-sided, pro-Ossewabrandwag account.
Astonishingly, a certain gatekeeper mentality prevailed among some of the senior staff at the Ossewabrandwag Archive regarding access to the more sensitive available archival material. This mentality remained in place until very recently and naturally affected contemporary research into the organisation. Regrettably, embargoes on access to certain documentation at the Ossewabrandwag Archive meant that even the above works do not provide an accurate historical account. Fortunately, these embargoes were lifted a few years ago, making it possible to set the record straight on the nature and extent of the Axis espionage networks in southern Africa, and the principal support role played by the Ossewabrandwag.
There are therefore several glaring gaps in the historiography surrounding the broader intelligence war in southern Africa. The available secondary sources at best present a rather one-sided account of the events. For the most part, these works are either pro-Axis or pro-British in their respective approaches. The fact that this episode of South African history is largely forgotten is a further cause for concern. To a certain extent the post-1948 sanitisation of the nation’s collective memory of these events was successful, especially since the documentary evidence remains elusive.
The aim of this book is to provide an unrivalled account of the German intelligence networks that operated in conjunction with the Ossewabrandwag in South Africa during the war, and to shed light on the threat level presented by the Germans to the Union’s national security. As such, the book investigates the broader intelligence war through a number of research objectives:
•to examine the functioning of the broader Axis intelligence networks in southern Africa during the war;
•to explore the initial contacts that were established between Germany and the South African opposition;
•to discuss the nature and functioning of the embryonic Rooseboom operation;
•to examine the quest by the Ossewabrandwag to establish a viable intelligence network and contact with Germany, particularly in the structure and operation of the Felix organisation;
•to consider the Allied counterintelligence efforts in South Africa during the war;
•to explore the post-war hunt to collect the necessary evidence to arraign Van Rensburg and his inner circle for high treason;
•to investigate the unsuccessful attempt of the Union War Prosecutions to finalise the case of high treason against Van Rensburg amid a changing political landscape.
The book relies on a wealth of primary documents, including both official and private papers, from South Africa and the United Kingdom. Taking a cue from Gaspard’s ‘archival intelligence hacking’, the manuscript critically engages with both national and international archival material, including primary sources preserved at the Department of Defence Archives, the Ossewabrandwag Archive, the South African National Archives, as well as the National Archives of the United Kingdom. As such, the book aims to offer a fresh perspective on a largely forgotten episode of South African history.
Evert Kleynhans is a lecturer in military history at the South African Military Academy. He is the former head of Records, Archives and Museums at Northwest University in Potchefstroom, South Africa. Several of his articles have been published in academic journals and he has also contributed chapters to two books. This is his first book for a general audience.
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